The field of the present invention is that of routing and more particularly that of address translation mechanisms used in telecommunications networks.
Network address translation (NAT) mechanisms or functions are conventionally used by home gateways to translate private addresses of the home network into public addresses of the Internet and vice-versa.
At present, the protocol on which the Internet is based is the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) described in the document RFC 791.
This protocol uses an IP address on 32 bits, which is limiting expansion of the Internet.
This limitation is driving the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6), the addresses of which are on 128 bits.
The deployment of IPv6 being relatively slow in practice, the present invention aims at an alternative solution to IPv6 to respond to the problem of the lack of IPv4 addresses.
Of course, the present invention is not limited to IPv4 and could be used in the context of IPv6.
Moreover, it is known that many services (peer to peer file sharing, voice over IP, etc.) require the setting up of incoming connections, i.e. connections from the Internet to the home network.
A constraint set for the present invention is that it should be able to accept such services.